I'm liking NixOS thus far. I've got it installed on my personal laptop. It's got some rough edges, but the benefits for me outweigh the downsides. I really like affordances like "nix-shell -p foo" to just run a shell with the "foo" command in it for one-off usages, instead of slowly accumulating installed apt packages that I forgot why I installed them.

Similarly, having any custom configuration inside of "configuration.nix" is way nicer to use than manually editing /etc/whatever.conf. I can have one place to store any custom hacks, with a nice comment as to why + git history.

> It's got some rough edges

I've recently been looking really hard at NixOS as a possible next-step. (I use Manjaro and am particularly interested in ways to keep my Laptop and Desktop in sync)

I've heard that the documentation can be pretty lackluster at times. Are there any other rough edges I should know about?

gaganyaan

I'd say it's really about the documentation, including "unofficial" documentation like bug reports and SO questions. Part of why Ubuntu is so popular is because there's enough of a community that whatever issue you hit, someone's probably already hit it before and asked about it on SO, where it has a highly upvoted answer that fixes the issue and explains it. That's also why NixOS seemed like a better choice than Guix to me.

One thing I ran into was setting up a Python project using poetry2nix. Mostly works great, but then you sometimes get inscrutable error messages. I had to copy this into a shell.nix file for reasons that aren't entirely clear to me (and I had to hunt it down from https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs myself instead of finding docs or a bug report):

    astunparse = super.astunparse.overridePythonAttrs
            (old: { buildInputs = old.buildInputs ++ [ self.wheel ]; });

One non-documentation issue I've hit is that even when using the stable channel, you live much closer to the bleeding edge than a distro like Ubuntu. I updated my system to the latest packages, and then my wifi wouldn't work after waking up from sleep. Turned out to be a kernel regression that was fixed a few days later in a patch update. Everything was fine again, but it's not something you'd run into with a more conservative distro. Similar issue with the latest Gnome breaking extensions for a while before they got updated.